TY - GEN
T1 - A nationwide study on cellular reliability
T2 - 2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021
AU - Li, Yang
AU - Lin, Hao
AU - Li, Zhenhua
AU - Liu, Yunhao
AU - Qian, Feng
AU - Gong, Liangyi
AU - Xin, Xianlong
AU - Xu, Tianyin
N1 - Funding Information:
We appreciate Wenli Shi, Junjie Hou, Rongyan Sun and Daliang Sun for their help in data collection and analysis. We sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and our shepherd Lili Qiu for guiding us through the revision process. This work is supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under grant 2018YFB1004700, as well as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grants 61822205, 61632020, 61632013 and 61902211.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/8/9
Y1 - 2021/8/9
N2 - With recent advances on cellular technologies (such as 5G) that push the boundary of cellular performance, cellular reliability has become a key concern of cellular technology adoption and deployment. However, this fundamental concern has never been addressed due to the challenges of measuring cellular reliability on mobile devices and the cost of conducting large-scale measurements. This paper closes the knowledge gap by presenting the first large-scale, in-depth study on cellular reliability with more than 70 million Android phones across 34 different hardware models. Our study identifies the critical factors that affect cellular reliability and clears up misleading intuitions indicated by common wisdom. In particular, our study pinpoints that software reliability defects are among the main root causes of cellular data connection failures. Our work provides actionable insights for improving cellular reliability at scale. More importantly, we have built on our insights to develop enhancements that effectively address cellular reliability issues with remarkable real-world impact - -our optimizations on Android's cellular implementations have effectively reduced 40% cellular connection failures for 5G phones and 36% failure duration across all phones.
AB - With recent advances on cellular technologies (such as 5G) that push the boundary of cellular performance, cellular reliability has become a key concern of cellular technology adoption and deployment. However, this fundamental concern has never been addressed due to the challenges of measuring cellular reliability on mobile devices and the cost of conducting large-scale measurements. This paper closes the knowledge gap by presenting the first large-scale, in-depth study on cellular reliability with more than 70 million Android phones across 34 different hardware models. Our study identifies the critical factors that affect cellular reliability and clears up misleading intuitions indicated by common wisdom. In particular, our study pinpoints that software reliability defects are among the main root causes of cellular data connection failures. Our work provides actionable insights for improving cellular reliability at scale. More importantly, we have built on our insights to develop enhancements that effectively address cellular reliability issues with remarkable real-world impact - -our optimizations on Android's cellular implementations have effectively reduced 40% cellular connection failures for 5G phones and 36% failure duration across all phones.
KW - 5G network
KW - cellular connection management
KW - cellular network
KW - mobile operating system
KW - reliability measurement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85113231472&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85113231472&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3452296.3472908
DO - 10.1145/3452296.3472908
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85113231472
T3 - SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference
SP - 597
EP - 609
BT - SIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 23 August 2021 through 27 August 2021
ER -